


but if I break it and forswear myself (may the opposite befall me)

by Huinari



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Helen, gratuitous head canon for character's background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huinari/pseuds/Huinari
Summary: Helen is a doctor, and doctors must do the right thing. And if it's hard, then you do it anyways, and continue on.
Kudos: 6





	but if I break it and forswear myself (may the opposite befall me)

Helen’s favorite uncle is the one that inspires her.

He’s a quiet man, her mother’s brother, but gentle in his eyes and hand and voice. He always listened to her, and while he never got her any sugar, he did like to give her gifts. Not just dolls like her father’s brother bought her, but books that were fun to read, and stethoscopes. Cheaper than the ones he uses, but still functional and a good fit for a child to use in her ‘practice’.

“I want to be a doctor,” she tells him, because he’s a doctor. “How do you become a good doctor?”

He smiles. “You can be a good doctor,” he agrees. “If you study hard and you remember that it’s important for doctors to do the right thing. Even if it’s hard.”

Her uncle is not necessarily the reason why she chooses to go down the path of medicine, because there are many reasons for that – the biggest, of course, being that it is one that calls to her – but he is an inspiration, and one that shapes her ethic as a doctor.

(It takes a few years for Helen to grow old enough and wise enough to hear the less sanitized version of his story and understand – that when her uncle was a young doctor, two years after Helen was born, he was called to resuscitate a young man who had been tortured to death by the police, and though he knew they wanted him to cooperate in hiding that particular fact, he still spoke the truth anyways.

Still told the journalists, despite the police eyeing him meaningfully, warningly, that there was a lot of water, on the ground, on the half-naked body, _in the young man’s lungs_. He could not outright say the young man had been tortured to death, because he had not seen it, but he could tell the truth, despite their efforts to hide it.

Her uncle did not know it at the time, but that honest testimony would be the start to a series of events that eventually led to mass protest all throughout the country, a democratic uprising that would change the political climate of South Korea. The integrity of a doctor who did not lie, even when threatened, meant that the secret was finally out, and the fuse on the building bomb was lit.

Helen does not think that she will be a revolutionary, and her uncle admits that he does not think of himself as one.

But he says that he is a doctor, always, and Helen thinks that she would like to be able to stand by her integrity as he did if push comes to shove.)

* * *

Philip Cho is not like Helen, in that he is not as interested in the field of medicine as she is. That may be in part because Helen goes after their mother’s side of the family, while Philip, well, Philip goes after their mother, who was the black sheep that went to law school instead of becoming a doctor like everyone else.

What her brother is good at is business – at reading people, at weighing and calculating numbers, at interactions.

Philip is a businessman, and he takes what their paternal grandparents started and makes it solid. He backs her so that she’s not just a genius, she’s a _sponsored_ genius who can do basically whatever she wants.

It’s good for the world, he jokes, that she has a strong moral compass that doesn’t waver easily. And that she’s a doctor who, you know, wants to save lives most times.

He is also her brother, and he is currently annoying and not falling under the ‘most times that Helen Cho has wanted to save lives and not, you know, end them’.

“Tony Stark,” he says, for the fifth time and yes, Helen is counting. She is counting because as her friend and sister-in-law likes to say, Helen has the vengeful streak of a nine-tailed fox and she is going to tell Tony Stark about her brother’s fanboying. Preferably in front of Philip while he’s trying to not make an idiot of himself in front of Tony Stark. “ _Iron Man_ wants to work with you.”

“Get out of my lab, you weirdo,” Helen says for the third time in the last hour, and like the last two times her order is ignored.

But it does finally get Philip’s brain moving from ‘holy-shit-my-sister-talked-to-Iron-Man’ to ‘hey-wait-doesn’t-Iron-Man-know-the-Avengers’, and Helen silently asks her past self why she didn’t just use good old-fashioned surgical removal before to effectively remove him from her lab. Her adjacent branch of the family tree is, and always has been, a little shit.

“Hey,” he says. “Does that mean you’ll meet Thor?”

Cradle, Helen reminds herself. Not Coffin. Shoving him in there won’t do anything to get rid of his annoying tendencies. It may even grow it.

( _But_ , Philip says after they flip each other off like the mature adults they are.

_But if he – I mean I know he’s a hero, he saved the world and all that, but if he tries anything –_

_Then I stab him_ , says Helen, knowing what he’s worried about. Tony Stark had a reputation once, a reputation that is known even halfway around the world. He is now known more as Iron Man, of course, because Koreans know about how rich men tend to be hound dogs but rich men being superheroes is new, but that doesn’t mean the past is forgotten completely.

_He wears armor_ , points out Philip like she didn’t notice. Just because he handles the business aspect of U-GIN while she handles the R&D does _not_ mean she did not notice.

It was one time. You follow a stranger because you thought he was someone you knew while also distracted by your phone _one time,_ and he never stops thinking she can’t notice blatantly obvious details.

_Very astute of you._

They flip each other off again, grinning despite themselves – though they have to scramble to pretend they’re not, you know, _immature_ when one of her aides enter.

Luckily Min-ah’s eyes are on the tablet. By the time she looks up, they’re adults again with only slightly twitching corners of the mouth.)

* * *

The Avengers are surprisingly normal people, for heroes who saved the world.

Normal, as in regular people. Even Thor – alien prince, god in history recorded by Earth, somehow wields lightning – is normal, even dressed in jeans and a button up like any guy in American college. A guy that looks like a god (ha ha, she’s hilarious) but normal.

“I guess I was expecting idols,” she admits to Maria Hill, and not in the sense of the word used for singers in her country. She speaks of gods among men, maybe. Superhumans. Flawless beings among mortals.

They’re – people. They laugh, make lame jokes, smile and frown.

“They’re extraordinary people,” Maria Hill says. “But they’re still people.”

Helen looks at them, mortals who stepped up to take on the Herculean burden of Atlas when the skies were ready to fall, and she thinks that while she’s not ever going to be a hero of their caliber, she can be a good doctor and support them when they’re wounded and weak.

(They are surprisingly easy and _fun_ to speak with, and soon Helen forgets that they are Avengers so much as they are Tony Stark, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner and Thor.

. . . yes, the last is still _very_ impressive. Helen wants to claim it’s her interest in him being, well, not of Earth, but she is also aware that her type is well-built guy with a gorgeous smile and blue eyes. And Thor is godly in his build. Pun intended. Shut _up_ , mental-Philip.)

* * *

“We have to evolve. There’s no room for the weak.”

“And who decides who’s weak?”

The best way to describe it would be like waking up. Like moving from that groggy, half-awake, half-asleep sensation on a morning when she doesn’t have to wake up to the sound of her alarm going off, into full consciousness and awareness.

Helen is up, and now aware, and she is horrified. At how her mind was not hers from the moment Ultron tapped that scepter against her chest until now, at the words that Ultron is exchanging with the two unfamiliar people in her lab.

“Life,” says Ultron. “Life always decides.”

What callous words you have, Grandmother, Helen thinks dizzily, and something in her mind replies, all the better to kill you with, my dear.

And Ultron could kill her easily, because she is not like the Avengers, she can’t fight him off like they could. She’d be dead in less than a minute, and that’s being generous.

She could pretend to be under his control. She could go along with it, for the sake of her life – and the lives of all her staff, as he so kindly threatened before just hijacking her mind completely.

She could. It would be easy. So easy.

But Helen saw Ultron, back in the Avenger’s tower in New York. Where a few years ago the sky opened up and an army spilled out, and the Avengers chose to fight at risk of their own life. Cowered behind furniture as the robot paused in its attack, recognizing her, keeping her alive for this purpose.

And that purpose, to make it easier for him with his crusade fueled by some twisted bullshit genocidal Darwinism.

Helen is a doctor because she wanted to help people.

Ethical questions about existences and souls are not for now. Helen makes a decision and that decision is that Ultron is not ‘people’, and his new body that she helped make with her equipment and knowledge is going to lead to the opposite of helping ‘people’.

“There’s incoming,” he says, twisting his head around like a person – but he isn’t. “The Quinjet. We have to move.”

The time has come, and Helen has a choice.

“That’s not a problem,” she says. It’s not because she’s a doctor, she’s not a revolutionary, not a hero who can fight her way out of this and save everyone –

But she can do the right thing and delay.

Helen cancels the upload. She stands by her beliefs, by what she sees as the ‘right thing’, and learns what it feels like to be shot and struck down, as if she’s just as insignificant as a fly batted away.

(Learns what it’s like, to see her staff – the people she knows, her _team_ – die with a wordless cry becoming the last sounds they make with their voices. Learns what it feels like to have searing pain, to clutch at the wound because a part of her mind is screaming, you can’t die, try to staunch the bleeding, you can’t die now-

_He’s uploading himself into the body,_ she gasps to Steve Rogers when he runs to her, spilling out everything she can. Trying to give him everything she knows, because if these are her last words, then they need to count. It’s revenge against Ultron for using her, it’s desperation trying to stop what she feels is going to be so many dead at the hands of a megalomaniac, and it’s the _right thing to do_.

Helen Cho is a doctor, not a combatant, but this is her fight, to ensure her patients are safe. Equip them with knowledge, prevent injuries where possible.

She didn’t quite sign up for being shot, but sometimes life just rolled like that, didn’t it?)

* * *

“I thought,” Ami admits, putting down a box of chocolate truffles on the desk. “That we would be talking about the Avengers.”

She, of course, means that they would have been gossiping. If they were awful people, then Helen would have spilled the tea and Ami would have listened to her rant, and if they were fun people then Helen would have spilled the tea and Ami would have listened, before dryly commenting that there are at least two people in the Avengers who are definitely Helen’s type so she should make a move and hit that. Either way, gossip about superheroes, which is a rare gossip and a privilege to be an inside source, and it would have been a fun talk.

“We still will be,” Helen offers. Because they probably should talk about it, how her working with the Avengers might have led to this situation and whether they should continue to do so. They, as in U-GIN, but also Helen.

Future planning. Not fun gossip about superheroes, so boo.

Ami rolls her eyes, but then they roll down to look at Helen, carefully, critically. Ami Han might not be a medical professional, but she knows enough about first aid and injuries to make a decent assessment.

Helen tries to not flinch under her friend’s gaze. She got off her ass and into her lab after speaking with Clint Barton, and her equipment is, despite the stolen and destroyed Cradle, still effective. Physically she’s fully healed. The wonders of technology, _her technology_ , that such a thing can be done. Wounds healed with minimum scarring, a body printed out of organic matter and metal. The latest that will leave Iron Man’s suits in the junkyard, collecting dust.

It still can’t bring back the dead, and there are three members of her team dead, five formerly injured who have been given well-deserved breaks. She still has to go see the families in person so she can give her condolences.

Wow, that sounds incredibly fake, and in her own head at that.

Ami just gives her that knowing look, because in university where Helen was all speed and looking forwards, innovation and intelligence sparking like a live wire, Ami was quiet and reflective in the deep, calm way of waters with hidden depths.

The method of presentation might be different but Ami is brilliantly intelligent in most areas. Maybe not her tastes in men, because she did marry Philip, but Helen is grateful for that blind spot.

Helen cracks, and tries to hide it by shoving a truffle into her mouth.

“I just keep thinking I should have broken free sooner,” she mumbles around her mouthful of chocolate. She’s run the simulations in her head, over and over again. The realistic ones are, of course, that she gets pulled back under if the base work has not finished.

The more wistful ones are that she managed to knock Ultron out. To stop him, somehow. Freeze his consciousness in the body he was trying to upload himself into? Destroy the body, corrupt it?

Maybe bargain, so that three of her staff did not have to die.

Park Min-jae, Ahn Su-mi, Kim Yeon-woo were good people, brilliant members of her team who had such potential, who were going to great things. Min-jae always made lame dad jokes but somehow made everyone smile nonetheless. Su-mi was bubbly and cheerful and could make any mood feel uplifted, and she planned team parties because celebration and treating yourself was Important. Yeon-woo was a thoughtful listener that didn’t like coffee but didn’t mind having an inside joke of the team be based on his caffeine preferences.

She is going to have to see their families face to face and explain why their children, spouses, parents, whatever familial loved positions were used, are not coming back alive and breathing and smiling.

Ami lets her take all the time she needs to organize the thoughts in her head, silently there as support.

( _You could blame the Avengers_ , she offers wryly when Helen has demolished half the box of chocolates. She got Helen’s favorites, and a few that she hasn’t tried before but likes very much. Bless her.

Helen shakes her head, because that accountability is hers. She is the leader of U-GIN’s R&D, and the leader of the team that Min-jae, Su-mi and Yeon-woo were on. That responsibility is hers, and she will not try to cast the weight of it by pointing fingers at the Avengers. They don’t deserve that, and she can’t do that.

Ami, who knew she would do that, only nods.

_You’re getting therapy_ , she says. Helen doesn’t protest, because when Ami’s grandmother passed away, it was Helen who made sure Ami went to see a counsellor. Privately, because stigma, but still, so turnabout is fair play.

_I don’t want to_ , Helen sighs _. But I probably should_.

Ami nods again _. I’ll go with you._

_To therapy?_

_That, and to see the families_.)

* * *

Wanda Maximoff apologizes to her.

She first introduces herself, of course, so that Helen no longer has to mentally refer her as ‘that woman in the lab with Ultron’, but after comes an apology, and an explanation.

Helen should be mad, probably. But Wanda is young (later she learns that Wanda is five years younger than Helen) and there’s genuine regret and sadness in her eyes, and Helen thinks about Sokovia, and how a city she never even heard of from a country she knew very little about rose into the air so high up it became a dot in the sky, and how different it would have been for a citizen of that country.

How it would have felt to be on an island precariously in the air fighting to save the world.

“You gave me back my mind,” Helen says, because when uncertain, a doctor’s integrity is to be honest. Here is her honesty, the truth of what she witnessed and experienced. “Under Ultron’s control I was a puppet. A resource.”

She’s a doctor, so she _is_ a resource, but it’s different. Being a resource on a health care team, one called in to save lives – she does not mind that. She loves that part about her practice.

Under Ultron she did not mind it, because mind control had a way of just being her, but under control.

It was still her, just being used in a direction that Helen would never go, and that’s what makes it worse for her, because if it was a different context – a chance to use vibranium to help make a new limb, maybe, or an organ – she would have loved it. Been fascinated by how the metal and the cells fused together, awed at their beauty. Felt her heart quicken at the revolutionary concept brought to reality.

She _had_ been in amazement, at the time, and remembering that feeling makes it worse somehow. That excitement _was_ her, as was the fascination. It was like she was consenting to it, enthusiastically, because knowledge could be tortured out of someone, forcibly coerced out, but that kind of passion and interest, that was all Helen Cho.

And when she woke up, none of that mattered because of what it meant. The horror had been too great.

The only way it would have been worse for her, Helen knows, is if she had never woken up, if she woke up when Ultron was gone, or in his new body that she helped make.

“You let me be a doctor again,” Helen says softly. Because when she was under, she might have been a brilliant scientist, a genius who loved acquiring more knowledge, but she was not a doctor, not really. “And let me make the right choice as one.”

Wanda breaks into tears, and Helen hesitates, but wraps her arm around the other woman and lets her weep. And if Wanda’s shoulder also grows damp, well, thankfully her makeup is waterproof today.

( _But,_ Helen asks _,_ when they’ve stopped crying. _How did you know that setting me free would –_

She hesitates to say ‘stop him’ because she kind of didn’t. That was the Avengers. She just bought time.

Wanda gives her a look that suggests she knows what Helen is thinking and disagrees with her assessment.

_He was using the scepter to control you_ , Wanda says. Implying that without it, Helen would not have gone along with Ultron’s orders.

That really doesn’t guarantee, you know, that she would do the right thing even when she was free of mind control, and Helen points it out. She could have continued to go along with Ultron to guarantee her safety.

But Wanda disagrees.

_Your mind was different from the minds of HYDRA’s scientists_ , says Wanda, which, if she is being told that her mind is different from Nazi scientists, she should probably take that as a compliment even if the bar feels rather disturbingly low. _Yours was one with integrity and strong desire to do the right thing, without excuses._

And, well, it does make it easier to look at herself in the mirror, to know that she did the right thing.)

* * *

When the dust settles –

(The Avengers are back in America, and though she was there for a while to oversee recovery and setting up ways so they can get the best care should they be injured, she’s back in Korea, in her labs, missing three people on the team who will soon have others take their place. Philip and Ami mostly satisfied with the damage control they’ve spearheaded in and are fairly sure U-GIN and Helen are safe. Wounds that can be addressed fixed and only time left to numb what pain remains.

It might not be the same as before but the dust has settled, and life moves on. Changed, but it moves on.)

Helen is not a revolutionary, or a businesswoman, or a hero.

But Helen is and always will be a doctor, just trying to do the right thing come what may.

**Author's Note:**

> -title comes from the Hippocratic Oath.
> 
> -I did consider coming up with Korean names for Helen and Philip (who was her husband in the comics but brother here because why not) but there are some Koreans who give their children English names as their legal names as opposed to having English secondary names so we’re just going by Helen (and Philip) here.
> 
> -Helen’s uncle is blatantly ripped off of Dr. Yeon-sang Oh, who was called in by the police in 1987 during President Chun’s administration to resuscitate a young man (Park Jong-chul) that was waterboarded. When a half-hour of CPR failed to resuscitate Park, the police tried to have Park’s body be taken to the hospital. Realizing that the police were trying to hide the truth of Park’s death by pretending he died at the hospital, Dr. Oh called the hospital and let them know they should not let the police take the body into the OR. 
> 
> Later, the police released a statement that literally said ‘after drinking a few cups of cold water and starting interrogation, [Park] went ‘gurk’ and dropped dead after the table was slammed’. Dr. Oh, however, testified honestly what he saw, which was one of the reasons why the truth of Park’s death was unable to be hidden like others similar to him before. That got people protesting all over the country and basically ended up getting Korea to be a real democracy.
> 
> Dr. Oh is still alive and practicing as a doctor. He has turned down offers to go into politics, and states that while what he did was difficult, it was the right thing to do as a doctor for his patient and that’s all he did. Superheroes are cool but so are other heroes. 
> 
> -Ami Han is the White Fox in Marvel comics, a quarter nine-tailed fox who serves as both a superhero and an agent of NIS (National Intelligence Service), Korea’s chief intelligence agency. Not here, though, because if she was then she would have been an agent under the Lee and Park administrations and that thought sparks no joy to the point where it sparks negative joy which means it had to be Marie Kondo’d for the sake of my own sanity and blood pressure. As for whether she’s still a descendant of a nine-tailed fox here, I’m leaving that up to the reader’s imagination.


End file.
